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Music from Mars: Curiosity rover radios Will.I.Am song to earth

The Mars Curiosity rover isn’t just a bad-ass robot scientist roaming the badlands of Mars. It’s also a jukebox. The rover transmitted Black Eyed Peas singer Will.I.Am’s latest song, “Reach for the Stars.” Tacky? Maybe. But it’s a song from Mars.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory radioed the song using Curiosity today over the 150 million miles between our planets. It was good publicity for everyone involved: Will.I.Am got to stand behind the idea that if you dream it, you can do it; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got a second boost of “coolness.” What was the first boost? Obviously its mohawk-ed employee, which inspired Obama to to consider changing his own do.

The New York Times notes that the Curiosity rover sadly does not have speakers to play the song on the red planet, though the audio wouldn’t come out the same in Mars’ atmosphere anyway.

JPL isn’t foreign to celebrities either. The lab invited a number of stars, from movie actors like Morgan Freeman to singers like Will.I.Am himself, to watch the “seven minutes of terror”: the decent the Curiosity rover made to Mars and the 7 minutes it took the rover to transmit its landing to JPL.